SOONER or later the average mortal must be tempted in order to see whether or not he will be found wanting. Naturally the sooner the ordeal is over, the better. Just now it is a consuming desire to record my first impressions abroad, to convince myself, if no one else in this cold and venal world, that while enjoying this privilege of foreign sights, I lived with my eyes open, trying to see things intelligently and thoughtfully. Not enough of a travelled worldling to be able to assimilate new impressions and views of life, or to be modified by new surroundings without yielding to this temptation, I have had recourse to the English language (as a vehicle to express my confusion of ideas), whose words are cheap and easy substitutes for thought. However, it is not written with the determination to give information, or to temper it with any sort of humor or guide-book instruction; but mitigated by actual knowledge of the places and things talked about. It may prove that I really think I can tell what I saw, just as a color-blind man thinks he can pick out red or blue; but the color-blind man, be he ever so teachable, can never know what he misses; and likewise the writer, without a heaven-sent sense or birthright for book-making, never knows how ineffective her narration of sights in book-form really is. It may be equally obvious that the gift has not been cultivated with zeal or properly directed; but whoever reads, I trust, will be born with the precious gift of sympathy.

It is amazing that one is not discouraged as they think of the better utterances upon these same subjects, which have become so constant, so multiplied, diffused, reported, repeated, stereotyped, telegraphed, published, and circulated, that books, pamphlets, speeches and reviews and reports are things that one tries to escape from. This effort will be characterized by haste and superficiality, caused partly by the lack of time and thought necessary to condense, or possibly a fear that its substance might disappear in a process of condensation. He who runs may read. In that great day of reckoning there will be charged to me so many golden hours lost between sunrise and sunset, for persistency in writing monotonous emotions while crossing the Atlantic for the first time.